


The House You Used to Live In

by partyghost (Arokel)



Series: Always At My Heels [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Bobby | Trevor Wilson Redemption, Bobby | Trevor Wilson-centric, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, I'm Sorry, This Is Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28271568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/partyghost
Summary: By the time Bobby got his license, he was also the last of his friends.Or, twenty years of Trevor Wilson driving past the same house.
Relationships: Bobby | Trevor Wilson & Alex Mercer & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters
Series: Always At My Heels [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2073294
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	The House You Used to Live In

**Author's Note:**

> my headcanon is that Reggie's aunt owned the house before Julie's family and no one can take that from me
> 
> and uhhhh merry christmas if you celebrate it, I guess? this is not a festive fic

Bobby was the last of his friends to get his license. He was the first of them to learn to drive, probably, if you counted the unpaved roads of his grandparents’ property in backwoods Minnesota as _driving_ , but LA traffic did bad things to Bobby’s famed unflappable calm, and besides, Reggie and Alex could drive, so what did Bobby need a license for?

By the time Bobby did get his license, he was also the last of his friends.

Luke never got his at all.

* * *

In the week following the accident, Bobby didn’t leave the garage. If he stayed there, if he sat on Luke’s couch and added riffs to Reggie’s stupid country songs and wore Alex’s second-favorite pink hoodie when it got cold, if he just _stayed there_ , surrounded by them, maybe they would come back. If he fell asleep with Luke’s notebook open on his chest, maybe he would wake up to the sound of the garage door and Luke himself yelling at him for snooping. If he stepped out into the sunlight, out of the one place that had ever been fully _theirs_ , they would be gone.

Reggie’s aunt brought him food and left him alone when he turned his back on her attempts to talk to him about it. His parents sent him to a psychiatrist.

In the months following the accident, Bobby slowly, painstakingly began to pack away the parts of his life that had belonged to Sunset Curve. Instruments – loft. Clothes – garbage bags for the Goodwill; until then, loft. Awful, scrounged-up furniture – curb or dump, depending how awful. Couch – still there, shoved to the side so Reggie’s aunt could store her motorcycle.

Luke’s journal, too, went into the loft, until the day Bobby could look at it without breaking down. He had recopied some of the songs by hand into his own journals, but seeing Luke’s words, in Luke’s boyish handwriting, was more than he thought he might ever be able to handle.

He offered the journal to Luke’s parents, but they tearfully refused. It hurt too much. Bobby understood. Reggie’s mom said, “he would have wanted you to have them.”

Reggie’s country songs he kept.

Finally, after Bobby could draw it out no longer, the garage stood empty, stripped and scrubbed clean of everything that had made it theirs. Reggie’s aunt planned to turn it into an art studio, she said. Light, airy; maybe some chairs on the ceiling. Bobby tried to tell himself that was for the best.

* * *

Trevor got his driver's license on his nineteenth birthday, a day after he changed his name and a week after his therapist decided he was no longer too much of a danger to himself to drive. As he pulled out of the DMV parking lot, just for a second, the sun flashed off his left side mirror and a young man in a blue hoodie on the street corner turned and smiled at someone, and Trevor thought, _Luke never got to do this._

He sat in his dad’s dull navy-blue coupe, diagonally double-parked, still in gear, until he could see clearly enough to drive. He didn’t go home.

He never told anyone where he went, when he left his parents’ house or his crappy first apartment or the less-crappy apartment he bought with his first royalty check, the days when the calm he worked so hard to maintain just couldn’t hold. How could he admit that in those moments, the only desire in his body was to be somewhere that no longer existed, surrounded by the trappings of an adolescence he had stuffed into plastic bags and left behind?

When he bought his own car, it was hotrod red and nothing at all like the sensible, matte-finish cars they used to drive.

* * *

Slowly, the world moved on, and Trevor tried to do the same. He had a new name, a new guitar, a new studio, new friends. He had shiny new platinum records and a new bestselling album filled with old arrangements of his old friends’ old songs.

Reporters asked him which of his songs was his favorite, and Trevor gave a different answer every time, with a laugh and a _how could I pick?_ because if he listened to any of them too hard, the tidal wave of grief he kept dammed up so well most of the time knocked him to his knees and rendered him useless for the rest of the day. He had sobbed after recording every single one of them, and then he had locked them in a drawer in his mind and vowed not to open it again until he could do it without warping the memory of them with tears like he had blotted the pages of Luke’s notebook.

Sometimes, late at night, he put on the radio in his flashy sports cars and drove back to their old neighborhood, past the garage that hadn’t aged a day, and if _My Name Is Luke_ came on the airwaves, he didn’t change the station. _Who is Luke?_ reporters asked him, and he never knew how to answer. An old friend. A memory. A ghost.

* * *

Trevor grew up, and with every passing year the garage began to feel more and more like a monument in the cemetery where Trevor had first practiced driving on a real road, a standing memorial to lives and people long gone, worn smooth by weather and the passage of time. It became routine; a ritual of the kind he had mostly given up after so many years of therapy, almost comforting in its unchanging banality amidst a world so full of flash and movement.

The neighborhood changed and the plants grew to hide the garage from the street, but Trevor kept driving. He didn’t need to see the high-windowed door to know that it was still there, still the same as it had always been.

Reggie’s parents got divorced and a developer bought their house and turned it into a beachfront shopping complex, and Reggie’s aunt got remarried and put the house on the market and moved with her husband to San Jose. And every so often, Trevor drove past the ‘for sale’ sign in the front yard and wondered what would happen on the day it disappeared.

* * *

When it happened, it was a coincidence. One of the men in Trevor’s single-dads group happened to live near the old house, and it was on an entirely mundane walk with Carrie in the absurdly-complicated stroller she had almost outgrown that he saw the moving truck.

If he had thought, in the idle, self-indulgent moments where he allowed himself to open that drawer and rifle through Bobby’s memories, that fifteen years was enough to dull the shock of it, he would have been wrong.

From behind the truck, hidden from view, he heard a woman’s voice, instructing her husband to hold the child whose distressed, hitching whimpers foretold a tantrum very familiar to Trevor after four years of parenthood. She didn’t trust the movers with the grand piano, she said. She wanted to supervise.

He would go open the garage doors, her husband said. The piano would fit perfectly in there.

Trevor crossed the street.

* * *

The grand piano did fit perfectly in the newly-renovated studio, though Trevor avoided it as well as he could without looking suspicious. Seventeen years and a new name had changed him enough that the house’s new owners couldn’t have traced him to Sunset Curve even if they had had the inclination to, but there was no need to embarrass Carrie in front of her new friend by breaking down in tears over the simple act of picking her up from a playdate.

There was a new kind of mundanity to driving past the garage only to park on the street so Carrie could bound out of the car and down the stone steps he had once walked so often he could do it blind. On nights when he was feeling maudlin, Trevor would sit for just a few moments as the radio played some pop song Carrie assured him was all the rage these days and stare at the glow of the porchlight through the ferns until he could see nothing else.

Most days, though, he pulled away from the curb as soon as the door slammed shut as if it were any other house with any other garage and turned the radio up louder to drown out the music. Surely a second lifetime was a long enough time to house the memory of a ghost – or if it wasn’t, at least it was long enough that the clothes he had once stuffed into bags were so hideously out of fashion that even a ghost would turn their nose up at them. The world had moved on, and Trevor had too.

* * *

Trevor got his pilot’s license on this thirty-ninth birthday. _What do you need a helicopter for?_ Carrie asked him. _We already have too many cars._ He didn’t know how to answer, any more than he had known how to answer when reporters asked him about the inspiration behind _Get Lost._ He didn’t need a helicopter; he needed an escape.

When Carrie and Julie split in the spectacular kind of schism only young people and divorced couples are capable of and Trevor was no longer obligated to drive past the Molina household, he had to try not to feel a small twinge of regret.

He flew over the garage, just once, and for a second allowed himself to imagine that he was viewing it from the angle his friends did now.


End file.
